yeah, it’s long — I didn’t have time to make it shorter

Menu

Gray Lady not so gray, actually

Somewhere, I thought that I had listed some of my favorite news visualizations from the New York Times. The NYT has really set itself apart among major newspapers with its creative and useful and glanceable visualizations. It’s the only newspaper I see regularly featured on my favorite infoviz blog – Information Aesthetics.

But I can’t find it. I still think it’s there, but I can’t remember what I was talking about when I wrote it. So this isn’t my favorite example – just the most recent one I remember:

So this morning I read (in Information Aesthetics, of course) that the NYT is partnering with Many Eyes to open the visualization lab up to the rest of us. There are only a few data sets there right now to play with but the topics range from baseball to religion to Sarah Palin. You have to work with them as-is, it’s true. So like many other projects the ultimate value of this will be determined largely by the quality of the datasets the NYT makes available.

From the About page:

With Visualization Lab, NYTimes.com users will be able to visualize and comment on information and data sets presented by Times editors, share those visualizations with others and create topic hubs where people can discuss specific subjects.

The visualizations that have been done will look familiar if you’ve looked at Many Eyes before – charts, maps, network graphs and more. There are also tag clouds, and Wordles, though I’m not sure what Wordle’s connection to the project actually is.

The awesomeness of the NYT visualization project isn’t an accident, it’s intentional. At last year’s InfoVis conference, Matthew Ericson’s keynote on bringing visualizations to the masses underscores this face (this account at the Visuale blog is thorough and interesting, though more focused on maps and mapping than the keynote was. It also includes a link to the slides).

Bertini, linked above, says at the end of his account that the one thing that remained obscure after Ericson’s keynote was the tools the NYT was using to make these visualizations. Certainly, the tools from Many Eyes and Wordle have been available to all of us for a while – this doesn’t answer that question. But it does highlight how powerful some of the tools available to us on the emerging web are.

I can’t find it easily now (though there are many that are related,) but right after Hurricane Katrina there was a New Orleans flood animation that was so clear (and devastating.) It was the first time I felt like I understood what happened, even after the days of news coverage made clear that it was terrible and widespread. I don’t ever describe myself as a visual learner, but so many of the NYT visualizations are so good…I read your post earlier, but looking at this one tonight prompted me to come back and comment:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/07/20/business/20debt-trap.html